Anti-Aging Medicine

Overview

In the mid 1990’s, a small group of cutting edge physicians got together and shared their ideas of where medicine is, and which direction it needs to go. Medicine at that time was a “sickcare” system instead of a “healthcare” system. Disease was treated very effectively with pharmaceutical drugs and very little was done with respect to disease prevention. The reason for that was a lack of true knowledge about the best way to prevent disease except for the typical “don’t smoke, don’t drink, eat healthy, lose weight, and exercise”.

Cholesterol lowering became even more of a focus, mainly because it has been mostly controlled by medication to the tune of billions of dollars of sales each year. Creating more and more drugs for disease and spending less and less time with each patient was a formula for disaster. This small group of doctors saw a different future for medicine, a paradigm shift from conventional thinking, and out of that was born anti-aging medicine. Those few physicians turned into over 15,000 and counting members of the Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.

Anti-aging medicine has three goals for the patient:

  1. Improve present health (Diabetes, obesity, hypertension, osteoporosis, etc.)
  2. Prevent age-related disease (dementia, stroke, heart disease, cancer, etc)
  3. Improve quality of life (energy, libido, memory, ambition, body composition, etc.)

An Anti-aging medicine program has four main elements:

  1. Healthy diet habits
  2. Proper exercise routine
  3. Optimal nutritional supplementation
  4. Bio-identical hormone restoration

It is not enough to just tell the patient to “eat healthy, exercise, and take some vitamins”. It is necessary to instruct the patient on exactly how to do all the above correctly. The specifics of each element will vary from patient to patient based on genetics, lifestyle, health concerns, and goals. That is why a comprehensive evaluation is important in order to individualize the program and assure better compliance and results.